File:I am a significant... speck of stardust.jpg: Difference between revisions

Significant Speck -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stardust_Origins

A Humble Moment to Consider Our Species' Place in the Universe

○ "Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together--surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing."

-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

○ "Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring."

-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

• More Cosmos quotes from Sagan at GoodReads

○ "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

○

"Don't be humble. You're not that great."

-- Golda Meir

○

Stephen Hawking, Rest in Peace

8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018

"Planet Citizen"

○

"Atoms that comprise life on Earth

the atoms that make up the human body,

are traceable to the crucibles

that cooked light elements into heavy elements

in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.

These stars, the high-mass ones among them,

went unstable in the later years.

They collapsed and then exploded, scattering

their enriched guts across the galaxy.

Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen.

And all the fundamental ingrediants of life itself.

These ingredients become part of gas clouds

that condense, collapse, form the next generation

of solar systems.

Stars with orbiting planets.

And those planets now have the ingrediants for life itself.

So when I look up at the night sky

and I know that, yes, we are part of this universe,

we are in this universe,

but perhaps more important than both of those facts

is that the universe is in us.

When I reflect on that fact, I look up --

Many people feel small, 'cause they're small and the universe is big,

but I feel big.

Because my atoms came from those stars."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

https://www.facebook.com/TheScienceLovers/videos/195916907642129/

○